Coffee and Curators: Tetela Amulets at the IUMAA--Reinterpreting a Medical Anthropology Collection as a Fashion Benchmark

Beatrice Atencah

Thursday, October 12, 3 p.m. (EDT)

Online on Zoom (register below)

A collection of objects from central Congo, gathered by an American aid worker in the 1920s and donated to IU in the 1980s, includes a sizeable number of amulets and divination tools. While the IUMAA has classified it as “medical anthropology,” amulets are also items of dress. As a fashion historian with expertise in African Studies, Heather Akou is interested in historic items of African dress in Western collections, which are almost never classified as “fashion.” This discussion will explore how amulets looked and functioned in Tetela culture in the 1920s and speculate on what may (or may not) have changed over the last century.

Heather Akou is an associate professor in the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design and a core member of the MA in Curatorship program.

Register for Coffee and Curators: Tetela Amulets>>>

In-person Event: A Vampire for Every Age

Monday, October 23, 5 p.m.

Join Dr. Jeff Holdeman as he talks about how every age creates the vampire it needs. He will discuss how and why vampires have evolved over time and across cultures and into different types, eventually leading to the movies of today and the modern subculture vampire. Holdeman is the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures. He earned his Ph.D. in Slavic Linguistics from Ohio State in August of 2002 and began his work at IU three days later. His main research interests lie in the history, language, names, and identity of the Russian Old Believers in the United States and in their previous homelands of Poland and Lithuania, where he has been conducting annual fieldwork since 1999. 

In-person Event:

taxonomía of a spicy espécimen

public performance pedagogy

by javier cardona otero

Thursday, November 9, 5:30 p.m.

Since the Enlightenment, taxonomy has been a Eurocentric enactment through which Otherness is constructed. This public performative pedagogy co-operates with its audience as spect-actors to problematize and disrupt learned habits of hierarchizing, categorizing, and naming minoritized subjects and their practices. Professor of Anthropology Shane Greene will moderate a Q & A with the artist/educator following the performance. Food and drink will be served. This interdisciplinary and interdepartmental event is sponsored by the Sawyer Seminar of "Global Slaveries, Fugitivity, and the Afterlives of Unfreedom"; the IU Departments of Anthropology, American Studies, African American and African Diaspora Studies; Gender Studies; Spanish & Portuguese; Theatre, Drama, and Contemporary Dance; and Latino Studies Program; the IU School of Education; and IU Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. 

Coffee and Curators: The Zooarchaeology of Red Snappers

Friday, November 10, 3 p.m. (EST)

Online on Zoom (register below)

In this free online talk, Ryan Kennedy discusses his ongoing zooarchaeological research on the rise of 19^th-century red snapper fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico. Using data collected from archaeological fish bones from New Orleans, he shows how fishing and shipping technologies drove the development of an industry focused on this charismatic fish.

Kennedy is an Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, and the Director of the William R. Adams Zooarchaeology Laboratory.

Register for Coffee and Curators: Red Snappers>>>